nquired:
"Doctor, is this case dangerous?" "Not in the nature of the malady,
madam," was his sad and sympathetic reply, "but fatal in the condition
it meets. Hope is broken. There is nothing to resist the damage."

One of his patients was a farmer who lived in an old-time log house a
few miles out from Silver Lake, who while working about his barn met
with a very serious accident which involved a possible injury to the
gall bladder. The main accident was not in itself fatal, but the
possible injury to the gall bladder was, and this, if it existed, would
show as a yellow tint in the eyeball on the tenth day. Fearing the
danger of this, he communicated the possibility to the relatives, saying
that he could do little after that time but that he would come just the
same and make the patient as comfortable as possible. For nine days he
came, sitting by the bedside and whiling away many a weary hour for the
sufferer, until the tenth morning. On this day, according to his
daughter, who had it from the sick man's relatives, his face but ill
concealed the anxiety he felt. Coming up to the door, he entered just
far enough to pretend to reach for a water bucket. With this in his hand
he turned and gave one long keen look in the eye of the sick man, then
walked down the yard to a chair under a tree some distance from the
house, where he sat, drooping and apparently grieved, the certainty of
the death of the patient affecting him as much as if he were his own
child.

"There was no need for words," said one of them. "Every curve and droop
of his figure, as he walked slowly and with bent head, told all of us
who saw him that hope was gone and that death had won the victory."

One of his perpetual charges, as I learned later, was a poor old
unfortunate by the name of Id Logan, who had a little cabin and an acre
of ground a half dozen miles west of Warsaw, and who existed from year
to year heaven only knows how.

Id never had any money, friends or relatives, and was always troubled
with illness or hunger in some form or other, and yet the doctor always
spoke of him sympathetically as "Poor old Id Logan" and would often call
out there on his rounds to see how he was getting along. One snowy
winter's evening as he was traveling homeward after a long day's ride,
he chanced to recollect the fact that he was in the neighborhood of his
worthless old charge, and fancying that he might be in need of something
turned his horse into the lane